[Un]rule Brit-Anglia: Speaking the Eng-closed

Have we been wrong in the way we’ve configured devolution? Specifically, have we [English] been wrong in the way we’ve understood devolution as, to an extent, setting Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland free to govern their own affairs and forge their own identities; while we [English] have been denied the choice of self-determination and self-identity: subjected to the imposition both of British rule and British identity?

Could we [English] perhaps not reverse this paradigm? Could it not be argued, on the contrary, that in being allowed to run many of their own affairs, the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish have been allowed to affirm and own their very Britishness; while it is we [English] that have set out in a different direction: a distinctive, [English] direction, albeit under the direction of the British polity and in a way that is predicated on the absence of a distinct Englishness?

That’s why I’m choosing to call it [English] – in red font and square brackets – rather than just ‘English’. The post-devolution [England] has been a virtual, shadowy ‘Anti-England’: the unacknowledged Real that is the actual ground of meaning (and also ‘ground’ in the sense of ‘territory’) and the referent of the symbols of Britishness and of the imagined country that is ‘Britain’. In other words, the UK government – particularly in relation to devolved matters – has become in one sense ‘really’ an English government. That is to say, its actions and laws relate in reality – on the ground and in terms of their impact on real people’s lives – primarily to England. But those actions and laws are symbolised as ‘British’ not ‘English’: they are not spoken of as the actions of an English government that affect a land called England and people who are English. Though the government itself is comprised mainly of English people, elected from English constituencies for which they are, at least in theory, elected to provide national government, the members of the UK government and parliament speak of themselves as a British government of a country called Britain.

In short, we [English] have had, since devolution, ‘government of the [English] people by British (but in fact mainly [English]) people for the British state (though ostensibly for the [English] people). It’s been a sort of ‘not-the-English government’: both really English, in the sense outlined above, but not-English / anti-English / British at the same time. Of England, by English people but not in England’s name, which would mean it was democratically accountable to a nation that knows itself as ‘England’, and acknowledges that government and those MPs as its representatives: which would, in other words, be real English (not [English]) government.

So I’m suggesting a new typographical convention – [England] and [English] in red and square brackets – as a way to refer to the ‘really’ English character of what tends to be referred to and imagined as ‘British’ even though it primarily relates to England in terms of its material import, and reflects an English perspective – political and cultural – on ‘the country’. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not suggesting that ‘British’ and [English] are in some sense equivalent terms: that if we all know that what is spoken of as ‘British’ is in fact really [English], but that we’re all just being inclusive and politically correct by referring to it as ‘British’, it doesn’t really matter whether you call it [English] or British.

For example, I’m not saying, as some Scottish nationalists do, that the British government and establishment are ‘really’ an English government and establishment. Well, yes, it is an English establishment, but one that is best evoked as an [English] establishment. The establishment, and particularly our present government, is comprised of privileged, largely public school- and Oxbridge-educated English people, with a typically English cultural and political perspective on the nation they like to imagine as ‘Britain’ and the polity they refer to as the UK. But it cannot really be referred to as an ‘English establishment’ when the people involved present themselves primarily as ‘British’, and see themselves as governing a country called ‘Britain’. They are English-as-British people that view themselves as governing England-as-the-UK; and it seems somewhat unfair, but understandable, for Scots nats to feed that back as ‘British-but-really-English’ people governing in the interests of a Britain-that-is-really-England. The whole point is that, whereas it might in fact be ‘really’ an English government, it’s not a government in England’s name that holds itself accountable to the English nation: it’s an English-but-not-English government, a ‘not-the-English’ government – an [English] government.

The more ‘British’, the more not-English, in fact – by which I’m trying to suggest a paradox that the more post-devolution British governments have tried to affirm their ‘British’ character and deny their [English] reality, the more distinct from the rest of Britain / residual Britain have their [English] policies been. In other words, the more they’ve led [England] in a distinct direction, different from the devolved nations, the more indistinct from ‘Britain’ has been their way of talking about [England] – as if the way to deny the separating of [England] away from the other nations of Britain that has been driven as much by their distinct policies for [England] as by devolution is to talk more and more as if that [England] and those [English] policies were all there is of Britain: to retreat into a solipsism, as much as a solecism, which denies the splitting up of Britain by re-imagining [England] as ‘Britain as a whole’ and, indeed, as ‘Britain as whole‘. So in fact, the more ‘British’ England’s governance and self-representation has become, the more [English] it has in fact been: distinct from the rest of Britain, which has a justifiable claim to represent the ‘true Britain’ and the true (at least, post-war) traditions and consensus of British government and political values.

The Labour governments of Blair and Brown neatly illustrate this paradigm and paradox. As I’ve argued elsewhere, one of the purposes behind devolution to Scotland and Wales was to allow Labour to maintain its hegemony over those countries in perpetuity, and to pursue Old Labour social-democratic policies there that Labour had given up on for [England]. New Labour, ostensibly a project for a ‘New Britain’, was in fact a programme for [England] only. New Labour’s Big Lie and act of treachery towards England was that, at the very moment that it plotted a neo-Thatcherite course for [England] only (on the assumption that Old Labour was unelectable in England), it had the gall to make out that this was a programme for Britain (as a whole). Old Labour was true British Labour – a party that thought that, by definition, socialist principles should be applied across Britain as a whole. New Labour, on the other hand, is really [English] Labour: charting a distinct (neo-liberal, market-capitalist) direction for [England] while at the same time presenting this as if it were a project for a New Britain and consistent with, but modernising, British Labour’s values – whereas, in fact, those British Labour principles had been abandoned for [England] but remained alive, well and funded by the British state in the devolved nations.

So, contrary to the language and our [English] conception of devolution, it was the devolved countries that remained more truly British, whereas it was the land that could be referred to only as ‘Britain’ (i.e. [England]) that set off in a different direction. This is not so much ‘England is Britain is England’, as the Scots-nats would have it, but ‘Scotland / Wales / N. Ireland is Britain and “Britain” is [England]‘.

But I don’t think one should impute deliberate treachery and deceit to the whole Labour movement in this matter; although I’m positive the Labour leadership knew what it was doing by spinning [England] as Britain. For the mass of [English] Labour members and New Labour apologists, [England] could be referred to only as ‘Britain’ because Labour was in massive denial that its distinct policy agenda for [England] was separating [England] from the old socialist Britain for which Labour was supposed to stand just as firmly as devolution was doing. Devolution and a distinct agenda for [England] in fact went hand in hand for New Labour: devolving Scotland and Wales to pursue separate policy agendas for the devolved countries and for [England]; but denying it was pursuing divide and rule, and abandoning its socialist principles for [England] only, by making out that [England]
was Britain – ultimately not divided from ‘the rest of Britain’ because it had been re-imagined as the ‘whole of Britain’ and no longer actually included the ‘rest of Britain’ within its New Labour horizons. The New Britain was in fact [England].

But what of the oh-so [English] present government and the not-PM-for-England, David Cameron, himself? Laughably, David Cameron’s Canute-like refusal to endorse a new EU fiscal-consolidation treaty back in December of last year was portrayed by some as an example of a new Conservative ‘English nationalism‘, something which I refute in turn here. But there are some senior Tories who would explicitly like to champion this sort of ‘go-it-alone-England’ – free from the two Unions: European and British – as the new English nationalism. Tories such as John Redwood, who described this anti-EU English nationalism recently, and paradoxically, as “the new force in UK politics”. (Paradoxically, because he still refers to “UK politics”; and English nationalism as such can be talked of as a reality only when it starts to become possible to use the phrase ‘English politics’.)

John Redwood is perhaps something of an exception, in that, unlike many of his parliamentary colleagues, he has never been ashamed of talking about England as a nation in her own right, with her own claims to self-determination. But for most Conservative MPs, it would be more appropriate to talk of [English] nationalism rather than English nationalism. Yes, they are, mostly, English MPs, elected from English constituencies, with a typically ‘English’ cultural outlook, conception of the UK and antipathy towards EU interference in [English] affairs. But the ‘nation’ they wish to safeguard from absorption into continental Europe is ‘Britain’. And if it’s necessary to accept the secession of Scotland as the price for being able to preserve, govern and shape that Britain in accordance with their ideological precepts, then so be it. Their Britain will just keep calm and carry on – with or without Scotland, and preferably without the EU – except that, without Scotland, it would be, err, mainly at least, England. But why let reality stand in the way of a good political fiction?

So the [English] nationalism of the New Tories is far from being a positive political programme for a new, self-governing England (which is true English nationalism). In fact, it represents a radical continuation of the distinct, Blairite policy agenda and vision for [England] originally set by New Labour, and which is so resolute to resist anything that might stand in its way that it’s prepared to go even further than New Labour in splitting [England] off from (the rest of) Britain. Whereas, for New Labour, it was sufficient to hive Scotland and Wales into devolved Old Labour enclaves in order to continue the Thatcherite agenda in [England], for the New Tories, it may be necessary to ditch Scotland altogether – if not, perhaps, Wales; at least, not yet – in order to continue the work of Blair.

But don’t let’s fool ourselves that this will involve building a New England as the continuation of Blair’s New Britain, because, just like New Labour, the New Tory project involves a radical denial of England as a nation in her own right, and with rights of her own. In fact, just as Cameron’s Conservatives are prepared to risk separating off ‘Old Britain’ (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) from [England] even further than devolution by happily tolerating Scottish secession, they are also pushing the England-denying project to its radical limits by privatising the last vestiges of the post-war British-national settlement in [England], which ultimately means privatising [England] itself.

This is the profound meaning of the [English] government’s Big Society agenda and programme of privatisation of things like the [English] NHS (which I now like to call the ‘English Public Health-care System’ (EPHS), as it is no longer British, nor nationalised, nor a single ‘service’ as such but is definitely English), [English] education, [English] policing and even [English] local government and public administration. Are you getting the point now? Thatcherism was about privatising British nationalised industries. But Thatcher’s New Labour and New Tory continuators have extended this programme of privatisation and marketisation beyond industry to the institutions and organisations that symbolised and embodied a shared British nation – but only within [England]. And once you’ve torn down – brick by brick, as Cameron put it last week – the edifice of the British state in [England] that was once publicly owned and run in the public interest, you’re left not with a new England but an atomised landscape in which health care, education, planning, policing and all the rest are no longer seen as being ultimately the responsibility of a national (e.g. English) government but are all in the hands of the private domain and the market: private enterprise, private individuals, social enterprises and co-operatives, competitive health-care providers, public-private partnerships, local GP consortia, local development plans concocted by democratically unaccountable local cliques in place of proper local democracy, etc.

In short, abolishing the national in [England] (nationalised industries, and nationally owned and accountable public services) ultimately means abolishing the English nation. The ultimate logic of Thatcherite privatisation and marketisation is the asset-stripping of nationhood, so that all you’re left with is the private sphere (and its extension, the micro-local) and the market. But for [England] only: they’ve made sure of that.

But the left – or the post-Blairite wasteland that passes for one in [England] – have got no answer to this, because any sort of answer would have to be national, and the nation to which the answer would apply could only be ‘England’. That’s why I have absolutely no confidence in the claims made this week that Labour, if re-elected into [English] government, would ‘repeal’ the present government’s privatisation of the [English] NHS, or the EPHS, if you’ve followed me to this point. And that’s not just because the [English] Health and Social Care Bill was in fact no more than a continuation to its logical limit of many of the marketisation measures New Labour introduced into the [English] NHS, but because Labour has no language in which to articulate a vision for the / an English nation as such, let alone for a new NHS that would be per force an English NHS now, because all possibility of maintaining the pretence that the now abolished [English] NHS was the NHS (i.e. the original, British one, founded by the post-war Labour government) has vanished. Just as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have remained true to the post-war British settlement, they still have their British NHS: state-run, -owned and -funded. So a new Labour (not New Labour?) [English] government couldn’t ‘reintroduce’ or ‘re-nationalise’ the NHS (the British one) because it still exists, except not in England. No, they’d have to create something new: an English health service.

Is the left in [England] at all capable of articulating a vision of and for England? Well, that is the 64,000-dollar (donation) question. And it’s a question, ultimately, that applies to all of our [English] political class, not just to Labour. Politicians will not be able to ‘reconnect’ with the [English] public, as the saying goes, until they reconnect with their own Englishness: until they liberate themselves from the mental chains, repression and ‘enclosures’ that prevent them from seeing and accepting themselves as English, and as having a primary purpose, as English politicians, to serve the English people and nation.

I use the expression ‘enclosure’ to refer to a confinement of the English and of England to the private realm, both in the context of the wholesale privatisation of England I’ve just described and in the context of a process whereby persons engaged in public life in [England] close off their ‘inner Englishness’ into their private life: not to be spoken of in politically correct, British (i.e. [English]) society. Of course, the two processes are linked. I was struck by this recently when reading an article entitled, ‘Britain is not just “undergoing privatisation”, this is a modern enclosure movement’. This described the process of privatisation of [English] public services, essentially as I have described it, as a latter-day version of the enclosure of common land in England from the 16th century onwards, but without mentioning that either the modern or original enclosures were largely limited to England – something that I wasted no time in pointing out in the comments!

What sort of mental enclosure, intellectual barrier or self-censorship prevents the author and many like him from acknowledging that public assets and services are being closed off into the private realm in [England] only or primarily, not ‘Britain’? Is it because they themselves – in the wake of Thatcher and Blair – fundamentally do not believe in an English public realm, out of some sort of internalised hatred and contempt for England, the common English people and themselves as English? It is as if, in their minds, England and the English – and themselves as English – deserve no better: deserve, that is, to be just cut-off, isolated, private individuals striving and competing against one another for the services and goods they need from private suppliers and employers, rather than expecting as of right the dignity of a nation that takes care of its own.

Politicians, left or right, will not be able to make an effective stand against the privatisation of England until they are prepared to resist the privatisation of their own Englishness. They’re going to have to ‘out’ themselves from their own British enclosures – ‘come out’ publicly as English – before they can pretend to speak in the name of an English public: an idea that they have thus far repudiated just as they have repudiated their own Englishness. English ownership of public assets means English people owning their Englishness. But until such time as those who would represent [England] can think of themselves as English, and identify with the English people, England will remain in the British enclosure.

In short, New Labour brought us an England re-imagined and marketed as ‘Cool Britannia’. The New Tories have brought us ‘Rule Brit-Anglia’: an England privatised and branded by the market as ‘Britain’. But for England to come into its own, to ‘unrule Brit-Anglia’, English people must first break open the mental ‘Eng-closure’ that prevents them from saying ‘England’ and choosing to speak in her name – which is, after all, what a real English parliament would be for. Then, perhaps, we’ll at last be able to talk of a self-governing England, not a Brit-ruled [England].

National Health Service or national myth? Why UK Uncut’s ‘Block the Bridge’ protest is an empty gesture

In Norway, after the horrendous massacres carried out by Anders Breivik in July of this year, acts of remembrance were organised throughout the country in which people held aloft red roses: the symbol of Norway’s governing Labour Party, and once the symbol of Britain’s. By contrast, no red roses will be carried by the followers of UK Uncut, which is organising a ‘Block the Bridge’ protest this coming Sunday: a blockade of Westminster Bridge, just opposite the Houses of Parliament, to urge the Lords to throw out the government’s NHS Bill – the last chance of its being defeated or modified.

No, the red rose – international symbol of socialism, and incidentally also an iconic symbol for England in the form of the Tudor Rose – will not be in evidence. This is despite the fact that the protesters ostensibly wish to defend the socialist principles and legacy of the ‘British’ NHS, founded in the wake of the Second World War by Attlee’s Labour government. Instead, the plan is apparently to deck the bridge out in the blue and white colours of the NHS brand, or at least the NHS brand in England, which uses a lighter blue colour than the logos for NHS Scotland and NHS Wales, and a darker blue than the branding for Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland – the equivalent of the NHS in the Province.

The NHS (the one in England)

Darker blue for Scotland

Nice Celtic image and dark-blue font for GIG Cymru

‘NHS’ vanished altogether in this sky-blue logo for Northern Ireland

As these logos neatly illustrate, the ‘British’ NHS that UK Uncut’s valiant brigades will be standing up for is not the British NHS at all but the English NHS; and the Union government’s NHS Bill does not constitute a dismantling of the British NHS but a reorganisation of the English NHS along market principles. The British NHS as such was in fact dismantled by the last Labour government’s lop-sided implementation of devolution, which created four separate health services for each of the UK’s established nations (for the purposes of this discussion, Cornwall being assimilated to England). And it was that same Labour government that began the further dismantling of the English NHS that UK Uncut and its supporters are demonstrating against, as it was Labour that began the marketisation of the NHS that the Tory-Lib Dem coalition is finishing off. And of course, Labour’s marketisation was based on the support of its Scottish and Welsh MPs, with whose help the introduction of Foundation Hospitals – in England only – would not have been passed.

So it is perhaps no wonder that those Blocking the Bridge on Sunday will not be sporting socialist red roses. Maybe the protesters realise deep down that it was Labour that first sold out the founding principles of the NHS: that it was to be both a state-run and -owned service, and a national service, available free at the point of use to all in Britain in a uniform, consistent way. And perhaps they realise that the NHS is already neither of those things and will be even less so – in England, that is – if the Bill goes through.

But try telling UK Uncut that the NHS Bill relates only to the NHS in England – and believe me, I have tried this week, via tweets and email – and you might as well be threatening to try and march the massed ranks of the English Defence League across Westminster Bridge on Sunday: stunning silence and a complete lack of engagement with the critique of UK Uncut’s discourse, which refers constantly to ‘Britain’ and the ‘UK’ in relation to this and many other England-specific issues, and never to ‘England’. Nothing. In fact, one imagines that UK Uncut would view demonstrators bringing banners displaying the Tudor Red Rose and flags of St. George on to the Bridge on Sunday more as potential reincarnations of Anders Breivik himself – whose somewhat tenuous Facebook links with some EDL members were joyfully paraded about in some parts of the media and blogosphere in the wake of July’s massacres – rather than as being like the noble Norwegian public standing up for a national institution and values that are under threat, and mourning its young.

Indeed, Sunday’s demonstration really has more of the character of an act of mourning for an NHS that no longer exists than a political campaign that stands a realistic chance of influencing the government and bringing about meaningful change. In this sense, the absence of socialist and English symbols betrays the lack of any coherent blueprint – to continue the logo theme – for how a truly nationally owned and accountable NHS might be organised and funded in England now that it is no longer possible to go back to the Bevanite British NHS. Because that’s what the protesters will be defending on Sunday: the founding principles of the British NHS, not the actual one in England that the NHS Bill relates to, or the potential for a better English NHS, run by an English government, that puts the needs of English people first.

In this sense, it seems to me that the UK Uncut protesters are more interested in engaging in political myth than practical reality. The NHS – the idea of a unified, UK-wide health service free at the point of use to all UK citizens – is still widely proclaimed as one of Britain’s great national institutions. Indeed, it is one of the things, alongside the BBC, that symbolises Britain itself: its national unity and values. But if people finally wake up to the truth that the British NHS no longer exists, it might also dawn on them that a unitary Britain no longer exists. UK Uncut’s failure to engage with these realities is therefore an expression of its, and many other people’s, profound inability to emotionally separate themselves from a British nation that is no more.

For my part, UK Uncut doesn’t cut it. Maybe the almost inevitable passing of the NHS Bill, for all the doubtless harm it will do to universal health-care provision in England, will finally convince people that the old Britain is dead and only an English politics, accountable to the English people, will put their interests before those of UK plc. I won’t be helping to Block the Bridge on Sunday, because I’d rather stand up for an English future than be stuck in futile mourning for the British past.

Cameron and Miliband speak of England’s riots without saying “England”

I suppose this sort of thing should come as no surprise any more. ‘England’ is, after all, the absolute taboo word for the leaders of the main UK parties. Therefore, it’s par for the course that neither David Cameron nor Ed Miliband could bring themselves to say “England” in their speeches today on the English riots and their proposed response to them. To be fair to Miliband, his speech did include the following phrase quite early on: “no major English city seemed safe or immune from what was happening”. But that was it: no further reference to the nation scarred by the riots last week in an article incredibly and insultingly entitled ‘The National Conversation’. What the ****! (I apologise to my readers, but I’m increasingly using the ‘F’ word these days, almost in inverse proportion to politicians’ non-use of the ‘E’ word.)

I’m not proposing to conduct a detailed analysis of these two speeches here. (Sigh of relief from some of you out there, no doubt.) I just can’t bring myself to do it, to be honest. Besides which, it would be pretty pointless: no one who really needs to hear the anger of a nation ignored and anonymised, even at a moment of national crisis, is likely to take note of anything I say. I mean, for C*****’s sake, large parts of our major cities were smashed up, ransacked and burnt down, and they STILL can’t bring themselves to address the nation by name! What is it actually going to take?

But it’s not just about hearing the anger of a nation spurned, but about the possibility of meaningful dialogue: you can’t have a meaningful ‘national conversation’ if one side of the discussion isn’t listened to, acknowledged and named by the other side. But as I suggested in my previous post, the British-establishment discourse and world view, which is now reasserting itself, is simply not willing or able to engage with the English narrative of futility, envy, rage and humiliation that was expressed in such a self-defeating manner last week because those resorting to such pointless violence lack the political language and civic skills to protest and challenge the powers that be more constructively.

How can I put it succinctly? It’s not just that the English violence that erupted last week stokes and confirms the establishment’s irrational fear of a nameless, formless, anarchic English mob that threatens to overthrow the whole British order, so that the establishment then reacts by castigating the moral disorder of certain nameless ‘parts of society’, and proposes stern measures to reassert the rule of law and impose proper discipline on the youth. It’s that the British frame of reference and set of values – the British narrative – that are imposed on the situation represent and reaffirm the very structure of repression that led to the violence erupting in the way it did in the first place. This is because the British narrative of ‘individual moral responsibility’ to which everything is now being reduced – however important this concept is – is effectively being used to deny the English young people concerned their own voice and their own stories. If heard, these would no doubt include many tales of chaos, violence, and spiritual and moral emptiness that their lives have thus far been filled with, and which erupted onto the streets last week.

The British establishment doesn’t want to hear that very English tale of what life is like for so many young people in our cities: it doesn’t want to hear it now, after the event, and it didn’t want to before the event. And it was because it wasn’t listening that the violence erupted; and as it’s listening even less now, the violence is all too likely to recur.

One of the things these young people need – certainly more than they need distant politicians they don’t know and respect even less preaching moral responsibility at them – is a country to feel proud of. The patriotic sentiment is important to young people, young men in particular. They need to feel they can be self-respecting, grown-up men, contributing to the prosperity and good of their country as well as bettering themselves. But that country, England, has been systematically belittled, fractured and marginalised by the politicians over the last 30 years or so, and particularly since 1997. The politicians have nothing to say to and of that country, despite the fact that both Cameron and Miliband peppered their speeches today with references to ‘our country’ and ‘the country’. The parties have no commitment to England and to any sort of vision of a better English nation, where it would be politicians and not just rioters who would hang their heads in shame at last week’s destruction, because it reveals how they have failed England and not delivered on their social contract to provide decent living spaces, education, employment and prospects to England’s youth.

It’s not only the youth of England that has failed but the British politicians that have failed English youth. They have nothing to say to that England, and they certainly aren’t listening. And that’s why ‘England’ will continue to be suppressed and ignored, not just in British political language, but in British policies that will not address English problems if they cannot address England by name.

England: A Tale Of Two Countries

What is the greatest division in England today? Is it the famous North-South Divide? Is it the gap between the haves and the have-nots? How about England’s world-famous class system? Or the division between rioters and non-rioters?

My answer is that it’s none of those things and, at the same time, all of them. But the biggest division in England today, and one which subsumes the others, is that between England and Britain, and between the English and the British.

Who are the English? Well, the rioting English – and let’s not pretend, as the British establishment has tried to, that these were UK riots – live mostly in what we shall call the ‘inner shitties’: shit, gang-infested areas and housing estates; attending shit schools that leave them ignorant and under-equipped for the modern work market; often in shit jobs on the minimum wage, if they’ve got work at all; and living in crappy social and physical environments where survival, and getting what you can get whenever and however you can get it, is just the norm.

Not all of the English live in the inner shitties, of course. Let’s not forget about the ‘country-shite’, where most of the low-paid, unskilled work is now carried out by Eastern European migrants; where housing costs are so prohibitive that families working in the country can no longer afford to live there; and where the situation has become so desperate for many farmers that they have the highest suicide rate of any section of the English population. But the riots were urban and weren’t about the country(side) – although they were about the country (England).

Where do the British live? Well, they were on their expensive foreign holidays when the trouble broke out. The English go on foreign trips, too, of course, though less now than they used to a few years ago, the Spanish Costa being the destination of choice. The British, by contrast, are a bit more selective and cosmopolitan in their holiday destinations: France and Tuscany, rather than Spain; and if you must do the Med, then at least make it somewhere a bit more exclusive than the major Spanish and Greek resorts – I don’t know, like Corfu, for instance, favoured by our wealthy chancellor.

When back in Britain, the British tend to live in the better areas that generally were not directly affected by the riots, with the exception of Ealing – though that’s near to the ganglands of Hanwell: Kensington and Chelsea, for instance; or Muswell Hill, where the TV producers and executives congregate, rather than neighbouring, ransacked Wood Green and Tottenham. From their comfortable islands of prosperity, it’s easy for the British to project the riots as a symptom of others’ failed morality, as these are depths of behaviour to which they’d like to think they’d never stoop and will probably never have to. From a safe distance, the British can generously characterise the violence and criminality as the expression of ‘sick’ parts of ‘our society’, for which they’ll set about prescribing remedies, including more ‘robust’ policing, and law and order measures that will keep the rioting English away from their doorsteps: a sort of ‘kettling’ and ghettoising on a grand scale.

In an excoriating attack yesterday on the hypocrisy of the British establishment in relation to the riots, the columnist Peter Oborne recounted the story of a posh dinner party he’d attended in West London, where the guests were talking of the ‘north-south divide’. He took them to mean the divisions between the north and south of England but eventually realised they were flippantly referring to the areas north and south of Kensington High Street. For him, this was an example of how the wealthy economic and political elite of Britain increasingly live in their own bubble, detached from the poverty and deprivation in many parts of England and their own cities, and feeling little sense of real ‘responsibility’ (Cameron’s favourite word) either for causing England’s social problems or for doing anything meaningful about them.

In fact, if there’s one thing the riots appeared to demonstrate, it was that there is much less of a north-south divide than is often acknowledged – in England, that is, as opposed to the divide between Britain and England. The riots, as a popular, on-the-ground phenomenon, spread like wildfire from the south of England to the north but did not spread across England’s northern and western borders: clearly, an England-wide and English-national phenomenon, with young English people throughout the country expressing solidarity with each other, of however crazed and destructive a kind, and wreaking mayhem for the same reasons.

And what were those reasons? Can ‘mindless’ violence, as the British termed it, have a rational cause; or can senseless destruction have a meaning? It’s too easy to jump to conclusions and provide ready-made explanations that often tell us more about the person offering the analysis than the events they’re trying to explain away. Isn’t the point, precisely, that actions that appear meaningless, to the British at least, express the fact that, for many English people, their lives themselves are without meaning?

Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, rather than being devoid of meaning, the lives of many urban English people have come to be seen – by themselves as much as by the British – as stripped of any intrinsic value. The only things that have any value for them are valuable things: merchandise that can be bought and sold for a high price. And if the rioters’ humanity has been debased by a life of humiliating relative poverty and feeling personally under-valued, then it is not so surprising that they in turn strip out the shops in their neighbourhoods that are the repository of the valuable items they think will give them a surrogate worth they don’t hold in themselves, and that they’ll leave those shops gutted: visual metaphors for the impoverishment of their own hearts and souls.

Feeling devoid of value also means lacking a narrative. Many commentators have spoken of the terrifying fact that the rioters appeared to feel they had nothing to lose in their brazen confrontation with the forces of law and order, and their wanton acts of violence. Feeling you have nothing to lose means you have no hope in a better future: no narrative about your life that gives you a reasonable expectation of making progress and gaining some of the good things in life – education; a fulfilling career; a home; a decent family life; a reasonable standard of living. It’s these things, these terribly ordinary, mundane things, that many of the rioters feel they have no prospect of as well as no past experience of. This is what life has become for many urban English: rubbish schools; crap jobs or no jobs, and little dignity in work; crap housing, as decent homes have been priced way beyond the purse of the poorer sections of society; broken families; and declining living standards. It’s enough to provoke a riot! Oh yes, it just did.

The British, by contrast, can afford to send their children to good schools; or, if they can’t or won’t send them to private schools, they can afford to move to the areas where the top-performing publicly funded schools are located, thus pricing working-class people out of the housing market. The British have an expectation, indeed a sense of entitlement, to decent careers in the professions, business and the public sector. They can afford to give their children a better start in life, more expensive things (the latest laptops, smartphones, designer goods), and enjoyable and educational experiences. And if they can’t always actually be there with the children because they’re working long hours or their marriage has broken up, then they can at least afford better child care and material compensations for the children. And as the pressures on middle-class incomes mount, the pressures to get around the problems through little dodges such as tax evasion, expenses claims, back-handers and bankers’ bonuses also increase. But as ‘we’re all in it together’, this starts to become morally acceptable, even normal.

Now clearly, it’s simplistic to make out that all the ‘winners’ in English society are British while all the ‘losers’ are English. Many middle- and upper-middle-class people in England think of themselves as English and view their country as England. However, the narrative, or even meta-narrative, they tell for their lives – past and future – is much more likely to be British. That is, the account they give of themselves, and the meaning they give to their lives and identity, are far more likely to involve seeing themselves as included and playing a positive role in ‘British society’ and a ‘British nation’, and hence ultimately as being British.

Why is this so? Because ‘Britain’ represents the established political and economic order in England, and those who feel they have a stake in that order, and have made a success of their lives by adapting to it, are more likely to identify with it and give it their allegiance. The British narrative is of a country called Britain – or its carelessly bandied synonym ‘the UK’ – where it’s possible to be successful by playing the game: making sure you can get into the right schools, the right universities, the property ladder in the right areas, the right careers in the most promising economic sectors, and picking the right partner in life to be the mother or father of your children, and support each other’s career goals. And British politicians cater to that market – that demographic – rightly concluding they will be unelectable if they don’t help create conditions in which this British ethos and this British dream can prosper; because it’s mainly the British voters on whom election results depend and who, in England at least, bother to turn out to vote because they believe they have a stake in the result.

So the British narrative is one of success, where success and social inclusion is defined mainly in economic terms: being a successful agent in the market economy – indeed, in the market society. By contrast, the English narrative is one of failure: a story of break-down – economic, social and moral. Or rather, the English narrative is one that is set in the past tense only: one that can only look back at what we had, or believe we had, in the past; not one that looks forward to any future. It’s a narrative of exclusion, precisely because the discourse of inclusion in the successful society is British. Indeed, the British identity can be said to be ‘inclusive’, in the multi-cultural sense, mainly because immigrants who do prosper in England rightly conclude that they owe their success to Britain: to the British economic and political order. What immigrant would want to be proud to be English when the English have been systematically stripped of pride in their own nation?

Perhaps, then, rather than saying that England is a ‘tale of two countries’, as I suggested in my title, it would be more accurate to say that England is a country of two tales: two narratives that mutually exclude each other – the British narrative of success and meaning, which systematically denies any positive English story, relegating the English to the scrap heaps of history and of their own burning cities.

But at the same time, the British and the English are the two sides of the same coin: the acquisitive greed of the rioting English is but the naked face of the materialist, individualistic greed of the British, with their debased currency of economic success at all cost. The madness we saw on English streets is but a reflection of the madness of a Britain that has sold out to selfish materialism, and the success and entitlement culture.

In short, the madness of our English streets is the bedlam you get when the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Britishness may be about pop and fish ‘n chips – but it’s not about to discuss Englishness

I wrote a comment yesterday on an interesting ‘Labour Hame’ article entitled ‘Britishness is about pop and fish ‘n chips’, which argued that there are many aspects of Britishness that are about a shared national culture that we would miss if the UK was broken up by Scottish independence. The comment lingered in the ‘awaiting moderation’ holding bay for a few hours then disappeared: presumably, deemed unsuitable.

Well, it’s nice to see that Labour has a new spirit of openness towards engaging with the English Question! Ironic that ‘moderation’ was one of the qualities that the article touted for Britishness, and which my comment reclaimed in part for Englishness! I don’t think my comment was that immoderate or objectionable, but judge for yourself below (lucky I kept a copy):

The definitions and evocations of Britishness in the Newsnight programme are nothing new. In fact, the New Labour governments tried to cultivate a sense of Britishness around precisely the values you list, which are in reality mostly English values (fair play, moderation, tolerance etc.).

Your argument is inconsistent in that you say that Gordon Brown’s Britishness crusade failed because it was linked to national (political) institutions and achievements, which implies that these things no longer hold as much sway or appear as relevant as they once did; and you also maintain that the principal ‘case’ for the Union is embodied in the cultural characteristics and expressions we share.

Accordingly, there’s no reason why we can’t retain all those cultural attributes of Britishness while dismantling the political Union and giving expression to the aspirations towards self-government in each of the UK’s nations – as expressed in the figure from the BBC / ComRes poll that Newsnight conveniently chose to ignore: that 36% of English people now favour independence (independence, let alone an English parliament, which a majority supports) for England, not Scotland.

By contrast, the relentless efforts by the media and political establishment to promote Britishness are intended, among other things, to suppress English-national identity and culture as something distinct from Britishness – the better to try and suppress any civic and political expression of Englishness such as an English parliament.

The Demography and Economics of England and London: Time for a separation?

This week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) produced its estimates for the UK’s population for the year to June 2010. This revealed that the number of people living in the UK rose by a staggering 470,000 over this period, to 62,262,000. Net migration (the difference between the number of people immigrating into the UK and the number of those emigrating) in fact accounted for less than half of the population growth: 230,000. (Well, that’s OK then.) The majority of the growth resulted from increased birth rates (797,000) – including from more inward migration of women of child-bearing age – and a reduced death rate.

What the headline figures and the media headlines didn’t comment on was the distribution of the population growth across the different countries and regions of the UK. However, these figures are available from the ONS, and they paint an interesting picture. According to the ONS, the estimated resident population of England rose by 424,300 (or 0.8%) to 52,234,000 in the 12 months to June 2010. This means that 90% of the UK’s estimated population growth in the year to June 2010 occurred in England, whereas England’s population as a whole constituted 83.8% of the UK’s population at June 2009. In other words, England is bearing a disproportionate share of the UK’s massive rise in population. The ONS does not break down England’s population growth by ‘natural’ causes (i.e. births vs. deaths) and net migration. But it’s a fair bet that as 90% of the UK total relates to England, around half or just under half of England’s population growth resulted from net migration.

This has clearly been a long-term trend as another set of data from the ONS suggests (this set looks at permanent residents and excludes those who are here only temporarily). Here, the English population at September 2010 is put at 51,363,000. Of this total, 6,472,000 people were not born in the UK: 12.6%. By comparison, only around 6.4% of the population of Scotland is estimated to have been born outside of the UK, while only 5.7% of the N. Irish population (much of whom presumably come from the Republic) and 5% of Welsh residents were born outside of the UK.

In terms of UK citizenship, of the 51.36 million English residents, around 4.02 million (7.8%) are estimated to be foreign nationals. (The difference, obviously, is that the remaining 4.8% of the English population that were not born in the UK have subsequently become UK citizens.) By comparison, 4.9% of the Scottish population comprises foreign nationals, versus 3.9% of Northern Irish residents and 3.2% of Wales’ inhabitants.

These figures clearly demonstrate that England has been impacted by population growth and net migration to a much greater extent than the UK’s other nations, and over a long time span. People will draw their own conclusions from these figures and use them at the service of their own agendas. But they at least put English people’s concerns about immigration into a clearer context: we actually have more grounds for concern than our neighbours in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (Having said that, these perceptions are distorted by the situation in London – of which, more below.)

England is already one of the most densely populated countries in the world. I make it that England’s resident population of 52.2 million gives it a population density of 1,038 people per square mile. According to Wikipedia’s list of countries by population density (which curiously does not break down the UK figure by its four main nations but does include separate figures for Jersey and Guernsey, for instance), that would put England in 31st place. However, most of the countries or dependent territories with greater population densities are either small islands or territories that mainly comprise a single dense urban conglomeration, such as Macau, Monaco or Singapore, to name the top three. The only countries with any significant land mass ahead of England are Bangladesh (2,919 people per square mile), South Korea (1,261) and the Netherlands (1,041). And the Netherlands has only 32% of England’s land mass: so we’re as densely populated as the Netherlands but on more than triple the scale.

By contrast, according to the same Wikipedia, Scotland‘s population density is a mere 171 people per square mile, Wales‘ is 361, and even little Northern Ireland‘s is only 315 – which would make them (if you add them in as separate countries to Wikipedia’s list), the equal-142nd-, 80th- and 94th-most populous countries / territories in the world respectively. (Just for inclusiveness, Cornwall‘s population density, according to Wikipedia, is 390 per square mile: 79th.)

Population density is all well and good, but it’s not in itself harmful, at least not to economic prosperity, as the territories towards the top of the Wikipedia list are generally among the most wealthy and fast-growing in the world (Bangladesh excepted). The same might have been said about England a few years ago. Perhaps it’s not so bad, after all, to be a densely populated small island dominated by a single urban conglomeration. But it would probably be more accurate to say that even in the ill-fated ‘boom-without-bust’ New Labour years, it wasn’t so much England that was the prosperous small-island territory overshadowed by a single metropolis, but that London, the South-East and the M4 corridor on their own were the ‘island of prosperity’ that should be compared with the likes of Singapore and Hong Kong. Indeed, the economy of ‘Londengland’, should we call it, was and still is rather similar to those of Singapore, Hong Kong and indeed Monaco: dominated by international finance and global trading links; a playground of the mega-rich; and a local economy fuelled by property speculation, and propped up by easy access to tax havens (which are also, strangely, among the most densely populated territories in the Wikipedia list) and other tax-avoidance scams.

According to the ONS, the permanently resident population of Greater London at September 2010 was 7.76 million. Of these, a staggering 34.4%
were not born in the UK, while 21.7% were non-UK nationals. And bear in mind, these figures relate to longer-term residents (i.e. people living in London for a year or more) and therefore exclude London’s transient population, much of which is also non-British. No wonder that whenever I go to London, which is quite frequently, I feel as though I’m in a foreign country: to a great extent, I am.

If we use the 7.76 million population figure, I calculate that Greater London has a population density of 12,792 per square mile, which would put London as a stand-alone entity in fifth place in the global league table, behind Hong Kong but ahead of Gibraltar. [Funny how so many of the most densely populated territories are present or former British colonies – including, arguably, England itself.] Conversely, if you exclude the population data for London from the English totals, you find that the proportion of the population not born in the UK declines to 8.7% (versus 6.4% in Scotland). Similarly, excluding London, the proportion of England’s population that are not UK citizens drops to only 5.4% (versus 4.9% in Scotland). And in terms of population density, without London, England’s total drops to 877 per square mile. This is still relatively high (it’s on a par with Japan) but a lot lower than the total including London. But bear in mind that this latter figure excludes shorter-term, very often non-UK-national, residents.

To summarise, if you look at England without London, the share of the population that is either non-UK-born or non-UK-national is much lower than the overall England totals, and is nearer to the levels in the other UK nations. Similarly, population density is also a lot lower: still high but not at the crisis level it appears to have reached if you include London. Looking at this the other way round, London is quite exceptional for England, and for the UK as a whole, in terms of the level of immigration it has absorbed and its population density.

In the light of the demographic and economic differences between London and the rest of the UK, it is not really surprising that the idea of London becoming ‘independent’, or at least more fully devolved, from the rest of the UK has recently been voiced (see here and here). Would it in fact make sense to make London a sort of semi-autonomous city state whose relationship with the rest of the UK would be akin to that of Hong Kong with China, or Monaco with France? We could let London do what it does best and be what it wants to be: a global city and magnet to finance, creative industries and people from all over the world, with a unique international culture – and a haven for super-rich tycoons seeking to avoid taxation in their countries of origin?

One of the articles outlining the case for London’s ‘independence’ even suggested that the rest of England could keep the royal family while London became a republic. On the contrary, I think it would be much more to London’s advantage to retain the monarchy and the Palace of Westminster as the seat of its government, while the rest of England could opt to become a republic if it wished to. Those old trappings of empire are a massive draw for the global travelling classes; and it would be fitting as a symbol of London’s transition to a fully ‘non-English’ British territory, inhabited by people from across the world, if the city retained at its heart some reminders of the former Empire that had first conquered the world in order subsequently to be taken over by it. London would become just another of those small but super-rich territories to whose confines the former riches of Empire had shrunk – leaving England free from British-imperial and Westminster rule to pursue its own destiny. The British royal family would then be one of those cardboard cut-out monarchies from diminutive European principalities and duchies such as Monaco and Liechtenstein. Indeed, London could even become the ‘British Kingdom of London’: the one territory in the former UK that retained Britishness as its national identity – leaving England to be England at last.

Of course, this is all a bit of a flight of fantasy, but there’s a serious point behind it: the economy and demographics of London and the South-East do distort those of the rest of England, which is a very different country from London. And London not only distorts the economic and demographic realities but also the perception of them, which is shaped by a London-centric politics and media. London is multicultural, international ‘Britain’ in a way that no other part of England or the UK is. And because London thinks of itself as the capital and centre of a continuing, and indeed continuous, British realm and historic legacy, it cannot get its head round the idea that, beyond London’s confines, there is in fact a diverse land of several nations that do not always look towards London as the template for their society, as the embodiment of their values or as the legitimate seat of power.

As a node of international trade, travel, culture and finance, it is inevitable that London sees itself as the capital of a country called ‘Britain’, because ‘Britain’ is the UK’s international brand: it’s the way ‘this country’ packages and markets itself across the world. And the UK state fosters a ‘British’-national identity for its – and even more so London’s – ethnic minorities in part because of the internationality associated with the British tag. This means that ‘British’ can serve as the label for the civic national identity of UK citizens, while ‘English’ (and ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ and ‘Northern Irish’) is relegated to the status of ‘ethnic Britishness’. In this way, London is the capital of a civic, multi-ethnic Britain of which the ‘English’ or the ‘ethnic British’ are only one ethnic group among others – admittedly still the majority population in London, but for how long?

My point is that London, at least in official parlance, does not see itself as the capital of a country called England: it may be a part of England but it is also apart from England. And if the capital city that rules England increasingly neither sees itself, nor is seen, as ‘English’, how does this affect the way England is governed? Shouldn’t London’s rule over England be severed? And is that a condition for England to be free to govern itself?

I do seriously think that England will not be able to break free from the British political and cultural establishment’s stranglehold on government, the economy, values and perceptions of national identity until the ties between London and the rest of England are radically loosened. Quite what form this separation would take is hard to predict; plus it is up to the English people, not the British government, to decide what should happen to its historic capital. One possible solution is a London devolved from within England, which in turn would be part of a UK of federal nations, if not an independent state. Alternatively, London could become to all intents and purposes a separate federal UK nation (the site of the continuing ‘British nation’, as I suggested above), generating wealth and commerce that would contribute income to the UK’s coffers for reserved matters such as defence and macro-economics, but with most of its tax revenues retained for its own public services and investment. In short, London could become England’s, and the UK’s, Hong Kong.

I’m not sure that many Londoners would particularly like their city’s transformation into a capital for global trade and business – but that’s the way it’s going, and that’s the way many in the City, the media and the corridors of power would like it to go. But should England continue to be dragged along in London’s wake and thrall? Can we define a different path for England if the agenda is for ever dictated by London’s perceived and vested interests?

England is a different country from London. Is it time for London to be a different country from England?

It’s official: English law discriminates against Christianity

Yesterday, a black Christian couple were told that Derby City Council had been right to bar them from fostering children because of their refusal to tell children in their care that the practice of homosexuality is a good thing, which contradicts their Christian views about sexual ethics. The ruling of the High Court in London stated that laws protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation “should take precedence” over the right not to be discriminated against on religious grounds, and that if children were placed with carers who objected to homosexuality and same-sex relationships, “there may well be a conflict with the local authority’s duty to ‘safeguard and promote the welfare’ of looked-after children”.

This ruling may well be correct in law – I’m not qualified to judge – but if it is, it does legalise discrimination against Christians and those of other faiths. The very wording of the ruling implies this: if there’s a conflict between discrimination on the grounds of homosexuality and discrimination on the grounds of religious belief, then it’s better to discriminate against the people who hold the religious beliefs in question rather than (merely appear to) discriminate against gays.

Why? Apart from debatable technical reasons (i.e. “there may well be a conflict with the local authority’s duty to ‘safeguard and promote the welfare’ of looked-after children”), the only reason for privileging sexual orientation over religious belief is that the moral rectitude, or at least the absence of immorality, of same-sex relationships has become unquestionable and uncontestable (including in law), whereas religious beliefs are now regarded as fundamentally questionable and are no longer accepted as resting on absolutes, either moral or epistemological (i.e. as being based on an objective theory of knowledge).

As the BBC’s religious correspondent Robert Pigott, writing yesterday, put it: “This was the most decisive ruling against the idea of Christian values underpinning English law since judges ruled last year that to protect views simply because they were religious would be irrational, divisive and arbitrary. Today the message was that courts would interpret the law in cases like the Johns’ according to secular and not religious values”. So not only do the laws themselves enshrine secular values and philosophically sceptical views towards religion – including Christianity: England’s traditional faith – but secular interpretions of the law will ‘take precedence’ over religious ones where there is a conflict.

I suppose one should not complain too much if the law and its interpretation reflect general changes in society, and its views on ethics and faith. But my point is that, as a result of yesterday’s ruling, this is likely to result in egregious discrimination against Christians and those of other faiths, which ought to be prevented in law not defended. For a start, the Johns – the couple at the centre of the case – were not adjudged to have committed any act of discrimination against gays: they weren’t actively trying to prevent gay couples from fostering; although many people, not just Christians, would regard a married couple like the Johns as more suitable foster parents than a gay couple.

So in reality, it’s just the Johns’ beliefs that were regarded as discriminatory and as therefore potentially being a ‘bad influence’ on the children committed to their care; i.e. as encouraging children to take on similarly ‘discriminatory’ views, thereby damaging their welfare, which the Council is statutorily obliged to safeguard. But is the Court, and society in general, really saying there is such a thing as a totally neutral, non-discriminatory environment in which children can grow up? The ruling appears to imply that it’s wrong for Christian foster carers to tell children that gay sex is morally bad but it would be OK for atheist couples to tell children that Christianity is wrong, both morally and in terms of its claim to truth. Is that what we’re saying: it’s wrong for Christians to tell their foster or adopted children (and their own children, too?) that gay sex is wrong, but it’s OK – in fact, positively a good thing – for non-believers to tell their charges that Christianity is wrong?

Besides which, the Johns weren’t even insisting on the right to tell children in their care that gay sex was ‘wrong’, only that they couldn’t tell a child that “the practice of homosexuality was a good thing” [quote from Mrs John's speech after the ruling]. In other words, the Court has decided not only that foster carers shouldn’t preach their Christianity to their children but that they should preach the ‘virtues’ of a gay lifestyle, i.e. actively promote homosexuality.

Let’s try to imagine a real-world situation: a child being looked after by the Johns is asking them about sex and relationships and, in the interests of that child’s rounded development, they’re supposed to tell him or her that it’s not only perfectly all right to be gay but that gay relationships are a positively good thing – just as good and valid as marriage (if not more so?) – even though the Johns don’t actually believe that last point to be true and their own lives are lived out on different principles. What nonsense! How is the child to make sense of that? ‘So, you’re telling me it’s OK for me to have gay relationships, even though you don’t think they’re right?’ How is that providing coherent moral guidance for kids?

No, what they would of course do is say that it’s OK to be gay (which virtually all Christians believe nowadays) but that, in their opinion, the practice of homosexuality is morally wrong and that the child should wait till he or she had grown up a bit more and was sure about their sexuality before deciding to enter into a relationship; and that after the age of 18, they would in any case be completely free to make their own decisions and that, whatever they decided, they would still be loved. This is being honest with the child and presenting him or her with moral guidance consistent with their own lifestyle, which the child can react against or not when they reach maturity. Plus it’s no different from what most loving parents would do, even in the case that their child came out as gay rather than just seeking guidance on matters of sexuality: they’d prefer their children not to start having sexual relationships until they were 18 and / or had left home.

If the Court thinks that providing children with strict moral guidelines together with loving care, up until the time that the child is legally old enough to make all his or her own decisions, represents a threat to the child’s healthy development, then it is the Court that is out of touch with English social mores, and it is the Court that is being discriminatory, not people like the Johns. Does the Court really think it would be more in the interests of a child’s welfare for its foster parents to say: “being gay is a good thing, and we’d be perfectly happy for you to start having a same-sex relationship just as soon as you’re over the age of consent”? That would appear to be what is being implied by the ruling: better to give children the ‘moral guidance’ that gay sex, and indeed any sex, is fine and proper so long as it’s legal. So one of the unintended (or perhaps intended?) consequences of this ruling will be to undermine the authority of parents to give their children any moral guidance about sex that might appear to limit their sexual freedom once over the age of consent.

And there are other apparent unintended consequences or implications to this ruling:

• The Court appears to be saying that it’s ‘better’ for children to be fostered and adopted by gay couples than by Christians with a strict moral code
• A same-sex relationship is therefore ‘better’ than a conventional marriage lived according to Christian principles, as being brought up in such an environment is potentially damaging to children
• It’s wrong to tell children that gay sex is wrong, but it’s OK – indeed, a good thing – to tell children that Christianity and other faiths are wrong
• It’s legitimate in certain circumstances to discriminate against people on the grounds of their religious beliefs, even when those beliefs do not result in discrimination against other people or beliefs
• The legislature for England now gives greater ‘precedence’ to secular-liberal principles – even ones which conflict with general custom and practice in society – than Christian principles
• The views of working-class black-English Christians are treated as less worthy of respect than the ideology of middle-class British liberals: would the Johns have been treated with the same contempt had they been middle-class white Londoners? Maybe; but maybe not.

In making its ruling yesterday, did the Court intend to imply all of the above statements? If not, an urgent clarification is needed – and, indeed, the Johns have called for a public enquiry on the issues raised. There are two fundamental issues at stake: the welfare of children and the law’s attitude towards those with religious beliefs. Without further clarification, yesterday’s ruling strongly implies a discriminatory attitude towards traditional religious faith: that it is somehow ‘objectively’ wrong, both morally and philosophically; whereas the belief in the moral rectitude of gay relationships has somehow been elevated into an unquestionable objective truth. On what basis? Are we really saying that if foster, adoptive and even genetic parents have strong religious views and moral principles, and they pass those on to their children, they are thereby damaging those children’s welfare and development?

Well, one unintended consequence of this prejudiced, stupid and ill-thought-through ruling is that the law has once again shown itself to be an ass: and an ass that, in matters of faith versus homosexuality, has got it completely arse over tip.

David Cameron: British-national identity and British values as an antidote to British state multiculturalism

I suppose it was only going to be a matter of time before Ed Miliband and David Cameron started to develop their Britishness narratives. First, last Friday, it was Ed Miliband waxing lyrically, and hypocritically, about how politicians had broken the ‘Promise of Britain’. Then the following day, David Cameron chooses a security conference in Munich as the occasion for a speech criticising the way “state multiculturalism” had created the climate of separation and alienation on which Islamist-extremist terrorism thrives. Instead, the Prime Minister argued that, rather than “encouraging people to live apart, we need a clear sense of shared national identity that is open to everyone”. A British-national identity only, of course, as far as people living in England are concerned.

In addition to fostering greater social unity around national identity, Cameron argues that Western societies in general need to take a more vigorous approach to confronting the ideology of extremist Islamism and to defending Western liberal values: they should adopt a new “muscular liberalism” instead of the “passive tolerance of recent years”. These liberal values read like a classic list of the ‘British values’ so beloved of David Cameron’s prime-ministerial predecessor: “a genuinely liberal country . . . believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things”.

We may or may not believe in all of these things; most English people probably do, in fact. But whether that defines us as a society, and defines what it means to “belong here”, is another matter. In any case, as far as UK-government initiatives to promote these values are concerned, they are confined, of necessity, to England:

“There are practical things that we can do as well. That includes making sure that immigrants speak the language of their new home and ensuring that people are educated in the elements of a common culture and curriculum [e.g. the UK government's Britishness classes and 'British'-history curriculum in English schools only]. Back home, we’re introducing National Citizen Service [England only]: a two-month programme for sixteen-year-olds from different backgrounds to live and work together [pretty much compulsory]. I also believe we should encourage meaningful and active participation in society, by shifting the balance of power away from the state and towards the people [the Big Society: again, England only]. That way, common purpose can be formed as people come together and work together in their neighbourhoods. It will also help build stronger pride in local identity, so people feel free to say, ‘Yes, I am a Muslim, I am a Hindu, I am Christian, but I am also a Londonder [sic] or a Berliner too’ [how about, 'but I am also English [since I live in London] or German too’?]”.

So British values and a uniform British-national identity are inculcated in young English people of all cultural backgrounds by teaching them to be British – not English – in schools; by introducing a form of semi-compulsory British-national civic service in England; by the British state withdrawing funding and responsibility for public services in England, which will somehow encourage people of all cultures to work together for each other; and by fostering local identities in England, but definitely not a national-English identity. Something doesn’t add up here.

Clearly, Cameron’s repudiation of ‘state multiculturalism’ is connected with his ostensible wish to see a transfer of power and social responsibility from the state to ‘the people’. State multiculturalism must therefore be an ideological, ‘artificial’ form of cultural pluralism imposed on the population by the state. However, Cameron wishes to replace this model of British multiculturalism with another form of ‘British’ multiculturalism in England-only that is equally imposed from the British centre and joins forces with the drive to assert Britishness as the uniform national identity for all people living in England – while it paradoxically also aspires to achieve more genuine, local, grass-roots integration by creating the conditions for people of all cultures to work together to meet their mutual needs.

We can perhaps shed some light on this confusion of different interpretations of multiculturalism and of conflicting ideological aspirations by looking at the various models of multiculturalism in Britain. I would argue that there are three main schools of multiculturalism and / or cultural integration, which broadly speaking are as follows:

• ‘separatist’ multiculturalism: a ‘one-in-many’ model whereby ‘Britain’, rather than providing a civic framework for bringing about cultural conformity and uniformity, becomes the place and enabler of cultural multiplicity. In other words, Britain becomes defined by its very cultural diversity, rather than being identified primarily with a single dominant culture with which other cultures have been integrated and assimilated to a varying degree
  
• ‘integrationist’ multiculturalism: a ‘many-into-one’ approach according to which the process of (multi)cultural integration is about assimilating diverse cultures within the framework of a unified set of shared civic values associated with (British) citizenship, including the adoption of secular norms for public life, and universal respect for and application of the country’s laws
  
• ‘transformational’ multiculturalism: a ‘many-into-the-new’ process, whereby the dominant, host culture opens itself up to being transformed by the minority, incoming cultures, which in turn open themselves up to being even more substantially transformed by the host culture – resulting in cultural fusion and the creation of something new that owes its heritage mainly to the host culture but in which aspects of the incoming cultures, albeit themselves changed into something new, are now accepted as integral features of the host country’s culture.
  

The first of these forms of multiculturalism corresponds broadly to Cameron’s ‘state multiculturalism’. Cameron’s critique of this is a familiar one, which I in fact agree with in its essentials, although I disagree with his prescription for remedying it. As Cameron says in his speech: “Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.”

Cameron’s answer to the deficiencies of this first form of multiculturalism corresponds mainly to the ‘integrationist’ model combined with a thin layer of ‘transformational’ multiculturalism. In other words, Cameron believes that we need (i.e. the British state needs) to assert ‘shared British values’ in a more aggressive (or, as he puts it, “muscular”) manner in order to counter the views of extremist minorities, while actual integration of communities on the ground takes place in a more horizontal, organic way by people working together in partnership, thereby counteracting the sense of social alienation that drives extremism in the first place.

In his emphasis on muscular, state-driven liberalism and Britishness, Cameron is in fact largely re-stating New Labour’s approach. In the last Labour government, a distinct transition was effected from the separatist multiculturalism that had marked left-of-centre / progressive thinking and practice until then to the integrationist model. This took place partly in reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7 July 2005. The British government clearly decided that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of ‘Islamist’ extremism was to encourage immigrant communities, especially Muslim ones, to sign up to the sort of roster of British values and norms I cited from Cameron’s speech above.

This concern to foster cultural integration and social cohesion by reinforcing British values fed into and augmented the broader Britishness agenda and the suppression of English-national identity, which then became such a massive feature of Gordon Brown’s premiership. The last thing the British establishment wanted to do was foster a sense of English identity on the part of migrant communities living in England, as the same establishment had embarked on a systematic programme to deny the distinct identity and culture of England and reinvent it as that of ‘Britain’ – a programme targeted at the existing English population. So migrant communities were encouraged instead to embrace British civic values, and respect for British institutions and law: the integrationist model.

The question, however, is whether merely buying into a set of liberal, civic values is sufficient to effect genuine cultural and social integration at the community level. Indeed, one might even say that the second form of British multiculturalism (the integrationist variety) is just as divisive as the first form (separatist multiculturalism) because it shares with it the same suppression of Englishness as the primary identity of England.

Separatist multiculturalism, that is, asserts that there is no primary culture in England or Britain as a whole, and that all cultures should be treated as equal; and, indeed, that this very pluralism is what we mean by Britishness and British citizenship, such that any assertion of a ‘primary’, ‘indigenous’ British culture such as that of England should be avoided and mistrusted as potentially discriminatory and racist. Integrationist multiculturalism, on the other hand, asserts that the primary culture of Britain, and particularly England, is Britishness: people from originally non-British backgrounds must buy in to Britishness as a condition of belonging; but English people just are British and nothing else – integration takes place as a merger into the Britishness that English people already are, and no distinct English identity or community is to be acknowledged or tolerated.

The denial of a distinct Englishness that is inherent within integrationist multiculturalism helps in part to explain the non-acknowledgement of the aspects of Cameron’s programme of muscular liberalism that are specific to England in the passage quoted above. But Cameron at least seems to recognise that something more transformational is required than merely encouraging all citizens to sign up to British liberal values: for Cameron, profound integration can take place only at the local level when people from all backgrounds come together to provide for each other’s needs – the Big Society model.

Again, I actually agree with this as far as it goes: true integration does arise when communities respect each other’s common humanity, recognise each other’s shared needs and dependencies, and open up to allow each other to provide services that cross over the community divides. But the trouble is, again, that the Big Society in practice is a model for English society (as communities and public services are devolved policy areas) but all reference to the English context is completely elided in Cameron’s language. Hence his emphasis on shared local identities rather than a shared Englishness: as a Westminster-elitist Brit, Cameron just can’t bring himself to embrace the amazingly transformational potential of people coming to say, ‘I’m a Muslim and English‘ and ‘I’m a Hindu and English‘ alongside the traditional ‘I’m a Christian – or, indeed, a secular liberal – and English’.

Now, that would be true integration: people from all cultural backgrounds coming together in a shared Englishness that unites them rather than a top-down-imposed Britishness that divides. That Britishness, whether in the many-cultures-in-parallel or the merger-into-common-Britishness multicultural mode, cannot but drive a wedge between the non-native and native populations in England because both modes seek to deny the core national identity and culture of the native population: Englishness. Equally, while most English people would broadly speaking have little difficulty in accepting Cameron’s list of British liberal values, it’s not this acceptance alone that will bring people together in a united community. This can happen only when both native and non-native English people come to see each other as part of the same community – the same nation: as English.

This is the real challenge of cultural integration in England – whether or not that actually helps combat Islamist terrorism: are the non-native communities going to be willing to see themselves as English in the first instance, i.e. to embrace ‘English’ as the label that describes the things that make their communities distinctive and mark out what it means to belong, say, to an English-Muslim community as distinct from a Pakistani- or Bangladeshi-Muslim community that is merely living in ‘Britain’ but separate from the English culture around them? And are we native English people going to be able to accept that Islam should become part of a shared English culture, albeit taking on forms of expression and a community life that are distinctive to England and differentiate an English Muslim from a Muslim from any other part of the Muslim world? Not that any English person is obliged to adopt any Muslim beliefs or customs at all if they don’t wish to, but they accept that it is the right of their fellow Englishman of any colour to do so. That is indeed what makes us different to the Islamist terrorist.

When we can accept the concept of an English Muslim, then we’ll have overcome the cultural divisions on which terrorist extremism thrives. But until we can do so – and so long as we think that non-native Muslim communities can be only British not English – those divisions will linger in our hearts and our minds.

What does the pope’s visit mean for Britain?

Yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI, aka Joseph Ratzinger, arrived in Britain for a four-day state visit: the first ever such state visit – i.e. as leader of a political state as well as church – by a pontiff, either since or indeed before the Reformation.

To be more precise, the pope arrived in Scotland yesterday and has now moved on to England, where he will be spending the remaining three days of his stay.

So what, you might ask? What’s so important about a visit from the leader of a brand of Christianity that even most Christians in this country reject? And what’s so important about making a distinction between Scotland and England?

To that question, I’d reply with another: which country, or countries, does the pope think he’s visiting? Sure, from the perspective of worldly politics, this is the head of the Vatican State visiting another state, the United Kingdom. But from an ecclesiastical and pastoral perspective (pastoral in the sense that the pope is the supreme pastor, or shepherd, of the Church’s respective flocks in Britain), the pope is visiting two distinct provinces of the Church of Rome – two distinct ‘countries’: Scotland, and England and Wales. The visit does indeed recall and hark back to a time, before the Reformation and the Acts of Union, when what we now know as Great Britain comprised two Christian kingdoms, not one United Kingdom. From the point of view of the Church, that is, they still exist as such – as fully distinct entities.

This fact alone ought to give pause to those English men and women among us who are inclined to rail against this invasion of damned ‘popery’: the very distinction between Scotland and England that is so important to patriots in both countries is a continuation of the ancient separation of the two lands into distinct ‘Roman provinces’ – in the Empire and Church of Rome – that persists to this day in the Roman Church. In secular life, that distinction was carried through to the present in part as a result of the very different course taken by the Reformation in Scotland and England & Wales, resulting in two established churches with radically distinct characters: the more Protestant, Presbyterian Church of Scotland, without any supreme head; and the more Catholic Church of England (and its Welsh counterpart) that still to this day acknowledges the King or Queen of the United Kingdom as its Head – continuing the role that a King of England, Henry VIII, expropriated for England from the Bishop of Rome. The same Bishop, in fact, who acknowledged Henry as ‘Defender of the Faith’, a title reproduced to this day on the side of British coins showing the monarch’s head.

Ultimately, therefore, the present British state owes the whole authority of its leaders, the spiritual focus of its identity and the ground of its sovereignty to a sacred mission originally conferred on an English king by the pope in Rome, and taken over by that king in his own name: to defend the Catholic Christian faith in this land.

As English men and women, we should therefore pause to reflect whether, in rejecting out of hand the Catholic faith and its unfashionable doctrines, we are not also in a profound sense conspiring with the ruin of England’s identity, indeed its soul. In ‘dogmatically’ asserting liberal and anti-Catholic (or at least, anti-Papal) views – perhaps in our own way out of adherence to what we regard as infallible secular ‘truths’ – on matters such as condom use, ‘gay rights’ and abortion, do we do so in the name of a secular Britain that is poised on the verge of wiping out Christian England?

Those liberal beliefs and values do not necessarily need to be articulated as ‘British’; they could be claimed as English, too. But I guarantee that during the pope’s visit, the clash of values will be presented as one between Roman Catholicism and British multi-culturalism, pluralism and secular modernity. The secularists of the present age are trying in many ways to complete the work begun in the Reformation: to smash up the Church of Rome. But in so doing, they would also finally wipe out the Catholic Christian heart of England, in the name of Britain.

So when the pope, in England, urges us to be mindful of our Christian heritage, the spiritual abyss of radical, atheistic secularism against which he is warning us does not just involve moral self-destruction but the annihilation of England as a Christian nation. Radical, anti-Christian secularism is a form of universalist humanism that has not only veered away from the very Christian roots of liberal humanism itself (‘radical’ meaning ‘at root’) but also does not recognise the validity and importance of distinct national traditions and cultures – unlike, ironically, the Universal (Catholic) Church.

The pope’s visit is, therefore, very much a call to England to value and return to its Christian roots, including as they are expressed in tolerant liberal humanism – just as the Church itself symbolises and takes forward in the present the Catholic tradition in Britain’s two great Christian realms: Scotland and England & Wales. This thought should persuade us to at least give the pope a hearing, even or perhaps especially if we find much of what he says challenges our present-day values – and to hell with the outright rejection and prejudice the anti-English British secularists would rather greet him with.

One essential precondition for killing England is to dethrone its official Christian faith and wipe out the memory of the medieval kingdom of England. Let’s not conspire in our own downfall.

‘Racist’ English nationalism: an alibi for Britain’s anglophobia and Islamophobia

It’s become something of a cliché in the discourse of the progressive wing of so-called British politics to refer to a supposed association between English nationalism and the racist far right. The key illustration of this link that is usually brought forward nowadays is the English Defence League: the protest organisation set up to resist the alleged spread of Shariah Law, and the ‘Islamification’ of England and the UK as a whole.

The EDL itself refutes the charge of racism; and as a general point, the question of the connection between ‘anti-Islamism’ / Islamophobia and racism is an interesting and complex one, which I’ll discuss quite a bit during the course of this post. While it’s true that hostility or wariness towards Islam, or some of its manifestations, by no means intrinsically involve racism, they are often a cover for it. This is certainly the case with the British National Party (BNP), which uses opposition to ‘Islamism’ (radical, political, militant Islam) as a displaced channel for racial hatred and phobia – the Muslims in question being invariably Pakistanis, Turks, North Africans, Arabs and other ethnic communities the BNP would like to expel from Britain.

Russian girl leads a recent EDL protest march in Dudley, bearing the Russian flag (from the EDL website)

And herein lies a problem: it’s the British-nationalist parties such as the BNP and UKIP that tend to exploit Islamophobia more systematically in pursuit of anti-immigration and racist political agendas, not ‘English-nationalist’ movements such as the EDL or the English Democrats. (And for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not suggesting there is an intrinsic link between racism and opposition to mass immigration – any more than I’m arguing there’s an intrinsic association between Islamophobia and racism – but the two do often go hand in hand: racist sentiment is exploited in pursuit of anti-immigration policies, while anti-immigration politics often serve as a displaced, legitimised channel for racism.)

In addition, it’s questionable to what extent the EDL really qualifies as an English-nationalist movement as such, i.e. one that believes that England is a sovereign nation that is entitled to determine for itself how it should be governed, whether as an independent state or as part of a continuing United Kingdom of some sort. On its website, the EDL talks just as much about defending Britain, the United Kingdom and ‘our country’ (the usual term for avoiding being explicit about whether you are referring to England or Britain) as it talks about England. If anything, the EDL appeals to what you could call the British nationalism of English patriots: that traditional English pride in Great Britain that sees no fundamental contradiction or difference between Britain and England, and sees defending the English way of life and the sovereign British state as one and the same thing.

It’s a mark perhaps of the extent to which all things England have been marginalised and repudiated by the liberal British establishment that this English pride in Great Britain now expresses itself primarily in terms of English-national symbols as opposed to British ones, even as the traditional ambiguities regarding the distinction between England and Britain persist: the British symbols have become so tainted with both racism of the BNP variety and the anglophobic bias of the British government that the only way that non-racist English pride in Britain can be asserted is through the symbols of England that traditionally were not viewed as contrary to an inclusive British patriotism.

And let’s not forget the catalyst that sparked the creation of the EDL: the insults that were directed at British troops returning from Iraq by a handful of Muslim hotheads in Luton, in March 2009. The said troops are of course part of the British Army, sent out to that Muslim country for the alleged purpose of defending Britain and British interests, not England as such. The EDL are in a sense, and perhaps even see themselves, rather like a latter-day Home Guard, set up to defend the ‘home front’ (England) in support of our boys on the eastern front in Iraq and Afghanistan. And let’s not forget that the theme tune for the TV sitcom Dads’ Army proclaimed, ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler, If you think old England‘s done!’, even as the arrows representing the retreating western front on the map of Britain and France displayed the Union Flag: the defence of Britain and the defence of England seen as one and the same thing.

The difference now is that the enemy is not Nazi Germany but ‘Islamism’, which, despite its radically different philosophical basis and political agenda, is viewed by its opponents in a similar light to Nazism. Note the pejorative impact of adding an ‘ism’ to the end of a word: Nazism, Islamism, racism, nationalism indeed; the word ‘Nazi’ itself being a shortened form for ‘national socialism’ – the effect of the ‘ism’ being to imply the existence of doctrinaire extremism, thereby foreclosing a more open and enquiring discussion about the phenomena at issue, whether Islam or nationalism.

Indeed, it’s in their opposition to ‘Islamism’ that the EDL and the British government find common cause: the avowed purpose of the EDL being to resist the influence of Islamists at home, while the mission of the British Armed Forces was often presented as that of destroying Islamist terror movements in their home base in Iraq and Afghanistan. I say ‘was’, as the rhetoric around the concept of Islamism, on the part of the British government at least, seems to have died down a bit since the demise of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. And indeed, it’s perhaps mainly in reaction to the perception that the British government’s determination to vanquish Jihadist Islam was slacking (troops returning from Iraq, with the police allowing Muslims to jeer at them; the soldiers in Afghanistan not being adequately equipped for the task; etc.) that the EDL was formed. So the EDL is not in fact primarily an English-nationalist movement at all, but an English movement for the defence of Britain whose motivations are remarkably similar to those of the British government itself during the last decade: a reaction to Islamist ‘Terror’ and the fear of Islam.

Picture and caption from the BNP website

By contrast, the overtly racist BNP rejects what it terms Britain’s illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems to me that this is partly, ironically, because the BNP does not wish to be seen to be condoning violence against Muslims, which – whatever justificatory gloss you put on it – Britain’s military adventures in those countries have undoubtedly involved. But this position on the part of the BNP also allows it to whip up hysteria against ‘the enemy within’ (Islamism) in pursuit of its racism-fuelled anti-immigration agenda: “Mass immigration has created a large pool of Muslims in Britain from which the Islamists — who have been waging war against the infidel khufars of Europe for over 1,300 years — can actively recruit. Britain’s biased foreign policy has given these Islamists, who are already not short of hatred for all things Western, a gift horse with which they can justify attacks inside Britain” (quote from the BNP website).

So to summarise the discussion so far: the EDL, which sees itself as anti-Islamist but not racist, defends Britain’s military campaigns in Muslim countries; whereas the BNP, which also sees itself as anti-Islamist and anti-immigration, and is racist whether it accepts the accusation or not, rejects the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the better to refocus attention on the ‘war’ against Islamism within Britain, which it hopes will eventually result in the mass expulsion of Asian Muslims from the UK. Neither of these movements, however, can accurately be described as English-nationalist.

The main political force that is avowedly English-nationalist, the English Democrats Party (EDP), seems at first sight to be altogether unconcerned by the supposed Islamist threat: I could not find a single reference on the party’s website to either ‘Islamism’ / ‘Islamist’ (or indeed ‘Islam’), ‘Shariah’ or ‘Muslim’. The one mention of ‘burka’ was a link to a Daily Telegraph article reporting the words of that doyen of secular-liberal, anti-religious respectability, Richard Dawkins, comparing the burka to a “full bin-liner thing” – thereby perhaps making a comical, unconscious association between ‘bin liner’ and ‘Bin Laden’. Dawkins did go on to clarify that, “as a liberal”, he did not support a ban on women wearing the burka in public – although his words were reportedly condemned as Islamophobic by a representative of the Muslim Association of Britain.

By contrast, a ban on the burka is one of the pet causes of the UK Independence Party, whose website mentions the word on no fewer than 179 occasions (according to my Yahoo! search restricted to the UKIP site). UKIP would reject the charge that its proposed ban on the burka is an expression of Islamophobia. Such justification that is brought forward for it centres around security concerns and an opposition to divisive forms of multiculturalism. However, UKIP’s advocacy of bans on face and head coverings (including the niqab, or full veil, but not, I assume, the Islamic head scarf, or hijab) is expressed in terms that link legitimate security concerns to the more irrational element of fear that is the very essence of Islamophobia: “one of the 21/7 bombers escaped wearing the burka; the hidden face can also hide a terrorist. When we talk of terrorism, we usually refer to a problem coming from within Islam. Of all the religions, Islam is the only one whose leaders do not wish their followers to integrate into our society, and Sharia, which can alas [also?] be described as gender apartheid, holds growing sway in too many parts of our country. So the burka is a symbol of separation, discrimination and fear”.

These words from the pen of UKIP’s leader Lord Pearson could easily have slipped from the mouth of BNP chief Nick Griffin, and illustrate how wariness towards Islam, or certain aspects of it, that could be seen as based on legitimate, indeed liberal, concerns around security, women’s rights and cultural integration is often also informed by more irrational motivations such as pure fear, and cultural, racial and (anti-)religious prejudice: the real threat of terrorism sliding over into the spectre of the Islamist Terror, and the burka being not so much an objective symbol of fear but the object of the viewer’s fear.

The same concerns inform but do not exhaustively explain UKIP’s anti-immigration policy: “A significant proportion of immigrants and their descendents are neither assimilating nor integrating into British society. This problem is encouraged by the official promotion of multiculturalism which threatens social cohesion”. Many ordinary conservative- and indeed liberal-minded English folk [deliberate small 'c' and 'l'] would agree with this proposition. In fact, I myself would agree with it, to the extent that I believe that multiculturalism has been used to promote a new form of multi-ethnic Britishness that is opposed to the supposedly mono-ethnic culture at the heart of traditional Britishness, which I would call the English culture: multiculturalism and anglophobia united in an unholy alliance to create a new Britain in which ‘the English’ (viewed by the liberals as an ethnic term, i.e. the white English) are just one ethnic group among many, and no longer the core culture.

This is a more nuanced position on multiculturalism and the role of Islam, which argues that it is not so much the existence of a multiplicity of cultures, races and religious practices in England that is marginalising the English culture and identity in its own country, although there have to be limits on the number of people from whatever cultural background that come into England, which is arguably already overcrowded. The problem, rather, is the way that cultural diversity has become another ‘ism’ (multiculturalism): a key plank of a progressive ‘British’ political agenda that styles itself as anti-(English) nationalist by virtue of being anti the very concept of the / an English nation.

Having defended the English Democrats against the charge of Islamophobia, I have to admit, however, that the English Democrats’ policies on immigration and multiculturalism are expressed in terms remarkably similar to those of UKIP and the BNP, except the primary reference for the ‘nation’ allegedly threatened by mass immigration is England, not Britain, and there is no explicit singling out of Muslims: “Many English cities are being colonised by immigrant communities who do not want to be part of English society, who want their own language and laws and reject English ‘Western’ values. Which begs the question: why did they come here in the first place? And leads to the second question: why not go back to wherever they feel they actually belong and give us back our cities? . . . Mass immigration must be ended. We would deport illegal immigrants and all those immigrants who are extremists, terrorists and criminals. We would regain control of our immigration systems by leaving the European Union”.

There’s no explicit reference to Islam here, but it’s clear what is mainly meant by “immigrant communities who do not want to be part of English society, who want their own language and laws and reject English ‘Western’ values” and by “immigrants who are extremists, terrorists and criminals”: it’s the same suspicion and fear of the Islamist Terror – the fear of radical Islam because it symbolises the radically Other – exacerbated, in the case of English nationalists, by the genuine onslaught against English identity that has been carried out by the British establishment in tandem with the ideology of multiculturalism.

So how can we unpick this tangled web of complex cross-overs between racism, anti-Islamism / Islamophobia, opposition to mass immigration, nationalism and British-establishment liberalism (by which I mean the British political and cultural establishment, and its broad liberal consensus around fundamental values, under New Labour and now the ConDem coalition)? One way to try to make sense of it all is to set out the different positions of the movements and ideologies I’ve discussed in relation to these issues in a table, as follows:

Party / Ideology	Is racist and, if so, towards which groups?	Is anti-Islamist / Islamophobic?	Viewpoint on mass immigration	Backs the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?	Sees itself as defending which (concept of) the nation?
EDL	Strongly denies it	Yes	Against	Yes	England and Britain without distinction
BNP	Yes: towards any ‘non-white-British’ groups	Yes	Against	No	Britain (with England seen as an integral but subordinate part of Britain)
UKIP	Not overtly	Yes	Against	Yes, but in a qualified way	Britain / the UK
EDP	Not overtly	Yes, but implicitly	Against	Yes, but in a qualified way	England
British-establishment liberalism	Yes: towards the ‘white-English’	Yes, but implicitly	Has encouraged it	Yes	Britain / the UK

All of these movements and ideologies could be described as nationalisms of one sort or another; and they’re mostly in fact variants of British nationalism, even the EDL, as I argued above. The only properly English-nationalist movement here is the EDP. And what in fact all of these nationalisms share in common is Islamophobia to varying degrees of intensity and explicitness.

Some readers will no doubt reject my characterisation of British-establishment liberalism as a form of nationalism, along with the charge that it is marked by Islamophobia. But as I’ve tried to bring out in the argument and quotations above, there is really only a sliding scale separating more liberal justifications for suspiciousness towards Islam, and for war in Muslim countries, and more irrational fears about the intentions of Muslims and the effects of (mainly Muslim) mass immigration on the culture, identity and even survival of the ‘nation’.

In addition, the British government under New Labour, and now, it seems, under the ConDems, have indeed ruthlessly pursued what can adequately be described only as a nationalist agenda to articulate, maintain and impose the idea of an integral British nation over and against the internal and external threats to its existence, both real and imagined: (English) nationalism, mass immigration and multiculturalism and the hostility towards them, Islamism, and terrorism. Furthermore, this has involved the most aggressive foreign policy that Britain has seen in decades – arguably, not since the botched Suez War – involving an apparent readiness to sanction dubiously legal pre-emptive military action against Muslim countries, supposedly in the national interest.

In all of these forms of nationalism, I’m arguing that there’s a more or less narrow scale leading from anti-Islamism via Islamophobia to racism. In the case of UKIP and the EDP, the specific racial make-up of the Muslims / Islamists that are the object of anti-immigration resentment and general suspicion is not usually referred to explicitly. We need to read the pronouncements of the BNP and, to a lesser extent, the EDL to get explicit references to what is only implied by UKIP and the EDP: these are ‘Asians’, used in a more or less restrictive sense – sometimes mainly meaning the Pakistani community, sometimes covering pretty much the whole extended Islamic community and faith seen as the expression of an alien (Asian) culture that is radically different from our European and Christian civilisation. The word ‘culture’ is, after all, so often used as a politically correct euphemism for ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’; so that, by extension, the much despised multiculturalism also implies multi-racialism, and the immigrants who are viewed as wishing only to retain their own culture and law are Muslims of another race who are perceived as preferring to keep up a sort of apartheid separating them from the (white) English than integrate with the English community at large.

In addition, British-establishment liberalism, rather than being merely anti-Islamist and anti-Asian-racist to a greater or lesser degree, is anti-Islamist-racist and anti-English-racist: both Islamophobic and anglophobic. How does that compute? This is a case of denied and inverted racism: the English as such are the ‘acceptable’ object of liberal-establishment racism, in part because they are the projection of the anti-Muslim racism the establishment won’t admit to but which it expresses violently outside of Britain, in its wars in Muslim lands. In other words, the establishment denies the Islamophobic racism at its heart by projecting it outwards: physically outside of Britain, by taking it out on Muslim countries; and symbolically, by ascribing it to the English, thereby evincing inverted racism – the English becoming the symbol of the British establishment’s own racism, in its very heart, which it used to be proud to call ‘England’. In this way, the supposedly racist ‘English nationalists’ represent Britain’s ‘alibi’: the group it can point to in order to exonerate itself of racial crimes abroad by saying, ‘no, that’s where the racism was at the time of the alleged incident: at home in England, whereas I was just out doing my work and my duty defending Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan!’

My view that the establishment is both anti-Muslim-racist (and by implication, anti-Asian-racist) and racist towards the English is based on how I view Islamophobia and anti-Islamism. Let me clear about this: I’m not saying that some of the forces of militant Islam don’t pose a threat to the security of Western countries. The events of 9/11 and 7/7 provided ample proof of that. But where concerns about this threat cross over into frankly hysterical fears about the imminent imposition of Shariah and the Islamification of England and Britain, this is where Islamophobia (the irrational fear and loathing of Islam) is at work; and Islamophobia, in my view, always involves a racial element, which some people (e.g. the BNP) try to exploit for their own political purposes.

With regard to the Islamophobia at play within establishment liberalism, you could say of it what used to be said of anti-Catholicism: that anti-Catholicism [replace with 'anti-Islamism'] is the anti-semitism of the liberal. Anti-Islamism is indeed in many respects the new anti-semitism: like the Jews before the war (the Second World War, that is) and in Nazi Germany, today’s Muslims are a combined racial-religious minority, some of whom insist – how dare they? – on continuing to adhere to their religious Law and in not mixing, socially and racially, with the surrounding population, call them Gentiles or kuffar.

In the liberal context, the suspicion and anxiety provoked by this racial-religious minority that appears to reject Western liberal values articulates itself in relation to typical liberal concerns around women’s rights (e.g. the burka issue), the desired goal of racial-cultural integration, and the supposedly irrational and archaic nature of the Muslim faith and religious practices. The words of Richard Dawkins, in the article referred to above where he’s reported as describing the burka as a ‘bin liner’, are perhaps instructive here: “I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women. . . . As a liberal I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban [unfortunate choice of words] on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice”.

Picture from the Daily Telegraph article

The phrase ‘visceral revulsion’ conveys a highly emotional reaction – suggesting that Dawkins is almost sick to his gut at the sight of burka-wearing women – and responses to seeing the burka and niqab are often expressed in such emotive terms, as if an instinctive abhorrence or fear is more natural and spontaneous, and therefore not dependent on cultural (and racial) assumptions and prejudices. But these are what Dawkins then immediately adduces to justify his reaction: the burka being, for him, a symbol of the oppression of women; and no doubt, his Western liberal-secular and atheistic beliefs also make him recoil at such an apparently ‘primitive’, religiously motivated, ‘irrational’ and distasteful cultural practice, so alien to those of the ‘civilised’ West.

At least, Dawkins does have the rather English decency not to advocate banning the burka, as is urged by some of the British nationalists I’ve discussed plus their associates in far-right parties on the European continent. But not only by the far right, as legislators in both France and Belgium have voted to ban people from wearing the burka and all face coverings. And they’ve done so precisely out of the same ‘liberal’ considerations that motivate both Dawkins’ gut reaction and his reluctance to propose a burka prohibition: to eliminate a supposed means to oppress women and to oblige Muslims to integrate more with the mainstream culture.

But did the legislators in question bother to ask the women themselves whether they wore the burka out of allegedly religiously justified but ‘in fact’ cultural oppression by their North African, Turkish and Arab menfolk? Perhaps they could have tried to take those women aside and use the services of trained counsellors to try and elicit whether emotional and physical abuse was going on, in much the same manner as they would deal with presumed victims of domestic violence and rape – but not by insisting, as Jack Straw infamously did, that the women strip off their veils so the emotions written on their naked faces could be read.

According to some of the reports I’ve read, the number of women wearing the burka in France is absolutely minimal: around 200 or so. You’d think the lawmakers could find a better use of their time and of taxpayers’ resources rather than bothering themselves with such a minor social issue! Except, of course, the issue isn’t important primarily by virtue of its physical impact on actual women’s lives but as a symbolic matter: it’s a question of banning the burka as a ‘symbol’ of women’s oppression or, as Lord Pearson similarly put it, a “symbol of discrimination, separation and fear” – never mind how much real oppression, fear, and forced gender and racial apartheid are involved. Ultimately, then, laws proscribing Islamic face coverings are about symbolically and bullyingly asserting the primacy of Western values, laws and culture over the values, laws and culture of the Muslim ethnic minorities living in our midst. But the effect of such proscriptive legislation is not to achieve greater integration and acceptance of Western values on the part of the Muslim communities targeted in this way, but to drive further divisions between them and mainstream society, and in fact to ghettoise those communities still further, so they can express their culture and religious practices safely on their own territory without fear of persecution backed by the might of the law.

But, as I say, in England and Britain, we’ve stopped short of banning the burka. But that doesn’t make Britain any less Islamophobic than mainland Europe: whereas their expression of Islamophobia is to ban the hijab from schools (in France), and now ban face coverings in public buildings and transport, the British expression of it has been our military forays in Iraq and Afghanistan; and whereas some in the British establishment might lament the intolerance they see in the French and Belgian laws, politicians in those nations have vehemently criticised what they portray as Britain’s ‘brutal’, indeed unlawful, actions in those Muslim countries, in stooge-like support of our American allies.

We might say that, whereas continental Europeans have directed their anti-Islamist fears inwards, against their own Muslim populations, we’ve directed it outwards against the Muslim populations of other lands. In this sense, the actions of the French secular-liberal state could be compared with BNP policy: focusing the aggression on the enemy within rather than without. I guess the urge to commit acts of violence against Muslims, whether ‘symbolic’ or physical, in revenge for the violence we have suffered at the hands of self-styled Jihadists, has to go somewhere; so it goes where it can. And joining the US anti-Islamist / anti-’Terror’ bandwagon was the perfect opportunity for Britain to direct this violence outwards, rather than inwards towards its own substantial Muslim minorities, which could have dangerously exacerbated racial tensions in England and would have gone against the hallowed doctrine of multiculturalism.

Ultimately, what I’m implying about the British military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan is that they could not have been justified by the establishment if the countries in question had not been Muslim and non-European (racially and culturally), and if the establishment had not drawn on, shall we call it, the popular or populist Islamophobia at work in the nationalist movements I’ve discussed, and also in the liberal and conservative English and British population at large. It’s this Islamophobia that made the propaganda around WMD credible to so many in the run up to the Iraq War; and it’s the same Terror of Islam that has been used to argue that Britain’s presence in Afghanistan is about wiping out Islamist-terrorist infrastructure. Whereas, in fact, there were no WMD in Iraq, and Al Qaeda disappeared like a puff of smoke in Afghanistan, leaving our brave troops – for whom I have nothing but admiration – shadow-boxing against the hardline-Muslim Taliban in a sterile conflict they cannot win, and without any evidence this has helped reduce the real terrorist threat – if anything, the contrary.

But at least, sending our boys out to bash the Muslims provided an outlet for anti-Islam sentiment. However, as these military escapades have been unsuccessful at realising their declared aims (and how could they have been successful, as those aims were themselves phantasms conjured up by fear?), this has created more of a potential for the Islamophobia to seek expression domestically, through organisations such as the EDL, whose formation, as I discussed above, was in part a reaction to a frustration of the desire to see fanatical Muslims defeated abroad and the terror threat – both real and imagined – lifted.

As the example of the EDL suggests, the relationship between British-establishment Islamophobia and that of nationalist groups is to an extent organic: the military forays in Muslim lands represent in part an attempt to channel anti-Islam sentiment outside of Britain, away from its potential to generate inter-community and inter-racial violence, such as that which has indeed been seen in the past in places such as Oldham. But the very act of doing so partakes of the very same Islamophobia, which is present in a more subtle form in liberal repugnance at, and preconceptions about, Islam, including that religion’s treatment of women, which is of course also one of the retrospective justifications brought forward for Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan.

It is this channelling of anti-Muslim aggression into an overtly more reasonable and liberal outlet that enables the establishment to dissociate itself from populist Islamophobia by claiming that this domestic anti-Islamism is a characterstic of English nationalism rather than of the British nationalism that it itself represents. But, as we’ve seen, there’s only really a sliding scale between liberal Islamophobia and the more overtly racist expressions of it; and both of these are far more typically associated with the symbols and discourse of the ‘British nation’ than with those of England.

England is therefore, as I’ve said, Britain’s alibi. But ascribing racism to English nationalism also provides a convenient extra weapon in the armoury of the British establishment’s assault on any idea or expression of English nationhood – a powerful tool to fallaciously persuade the great liberal and conservative English majority that any assertion of English nationhood will inevitably stir up the mythical demons of an allegedly racist English past.

I say the liberals and conservatives (small ‘l’ and ‘c’) because the progressives don’t need convincing: they’re already sold on the myth that English nationalism is inherently tied up with the assertion of white-racial supremacy, and that only ‘Britain’ can serve as a vessel for multiculturalism and multi-racialism. And it is this hooking of the ‘Britain’ brand to the ideals of multiculturalism that creates such an imperative for the British establishment to disown the Islamophobia at the very heart of its own liberalism, given that racially underpinned prejudice towards one of the many cultures that are meant to be accommodated within the multicultural framework is apparently so radically at odds with that multiculturalism itself.

Hence, it is so convenient to point the finger of blame for racist Islamophobia on the English nationalists, and to ascribe it to those – mostly British nationalists, but also some English nationalists – who would rather have a mono-racial, mono-cultural England and Britain, rather than to English and British society at large and a more all-pervading suspiciousness towards Islam.

But is multiculturalism really a counter-racist, inclusive ideal? On the contrary, it seems to me, the so-called British model of multiculturalism is quite profoundly racist in a rather subtle way, which in turn reveals what British anglophobia and British Islamophobia have in common. This is because British multiculturalism involves the idea that the different cultures in Britain should remain different, multiple and separate; and the state and the public sector provides support for the different communities to preserve and express their distinct cultures. But it’s this that reinforces cultural and racial apartheid: each ethnic group in their separate compartments, not overlapping, intermingling and being transformed in the mutual exchange of values, customs and shared humanity. It’s the apartheid of the ethnic-racial tick box, as per the profoundly racist Census of England and Wales: ‘British-Pakistani’ and ‘White-English’ in radically separate categories because the whole population has been broken up into a thousand and one distinct racial-cultural ethnic groups, the ‘English’ being just one, and a white-only one to boot.

The deeply racist reaction of the British establishment in the face of the fracturing of (the idea of) a monolithic British nation through the combined impact of nationalisms (including, and perhaps primarily (if the truth be told), the Scottish and Welsh variety) and mass immigration has been to redefine the unity and integrity of Britain in terms of its very diversity and multiplicity, and to celebrate and reinforce that rather than truly trying to integrate it within the core culture and tradition of the realm. And that’s because the core culture and identity are those of England, not Britain as such.

The British establishment has carried on a sort of racial divide and rule: divide the population into apparently irreconcilable units, racially and culturally, the better to promulgate the idea of Britain and the authority of the British state as the only things that can hold it all together. By contrast, the only way true cultural cohesion could be fostered in England would be by celebrating England itself as the nation into which immigrants have come to make their home, and Englishness as the culture they should aspire to embrace – rather than a multicultural Britishness that exempts them and the English from coming together. For it has to be a mutual process: the English sharing of their culture in a spirit of welcome and generosity, and migrants sharing the riches of their cultures in a way that is respectful of but not subservient to the host culture – and both being transformed in the process.

This is the only way forward for English nationalists and for Muslims that seek genuine dialogue and integration within English society, without having to give up the aspects of their culture and faith they hold most dear. The ‘enemy’ for the English is not the Muslims, nor should we English allow ourselves to become enemies to the Muslims. The true enemy is the racism in all our hearts, which the British establishment would rather we directed against each other instead of transcending it to create a new England, freed from the prejudices and divisions that are Britain’s stock in trade and only hope.